Digital Commons Network^™

A Call To Abolish Determinate-Plus Sentencing In Washington, Rachel Stenberg

Washington Law Review

For certain incarcerated individuals who commit sex offenses, Washington State’s determinate-plus sentencing structure requires a showing of rehabilitation before release. This highly subjective “releasability” determination occurs after an individual has already served a standard sentence. A review of recent releasability determinations reveals sentences are often extended on arbitrary and inconsistent grounds—especially for individuals who face systemic challenges in prison due to their identity or condition. This Comment shows that the criteria to determine whether individuals are releasable is an incomplete picture of their actual experience in the carceral setting, using the distinct example of incarcerated individuals with mental illness. While …

Rethinking Constitutionally Impermissible Punishment, Nadia Banteka, Erika Nyborg-Burch

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In this Essay, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our understanding of constitutionally permissible punishment. We argue, first, that the protracted failure to act by those who have had authority to do so during this public health emergency created a high risk that incarcerated people would suffer severe illness—and even death—in violation of due process protections and the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Second, we suggest that a changed understanding of public safety in the context of detention and release during public health emergencies has the potential to shift the framework even after the emergency …

An Algorithmic Assessment Of Parole Decisions, Hannah Lacqueur, Ryan W. Copus

Faculty Works

Objectives: Parole is an important mechanism for alleviating the extraordinary social and financial costs of mass incarceration. Yet parole boards can also present a major obstacle, denying parole to low-risk inmates who could safely be released from prison. We evaluate a major parole institution, the New York State Parole Board, quantifying the costs of suboptimal decision-making.

Methods: Using ensemble Machine Learning, we predict any arrest and any violent felony arrest within three years to generate criminal risk predictions for individuals released on parole in New York from 2012–2015. We quantify the social welfare loss of the Board’s suboptimal decisions by …

Freedom Isn’T Free: Why Washington State Needs To Move Beyond A Cash Bail System, Andre Jimenez

Global Honors Theses

Despite the belief that our justice system holds people “innocent until proven guilty,” for those who are unable to pay for their freedom from pretrial detention, they find the opposite to be true. The cash bail system in this country allows people to pay a court-determined fee to be released from jail after arrest while they wait for their trial. But as this paper demonstrates, the cash bail system as it currently stands in Washington State criminalizes poverty and simultaneously exacerbates racial inequities. Under this system, accused individuals who cannot afford bail, as well as their families, face extreme social …

The Pathological Whiteness Of Prosecution, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Criminal law scholarship suffers from a Whiteness problem. While scholars appear to be increasingly concerned with the racial disparities within the criminal legal system, the scholarship’s focus tends to be on the marginalized communities and the various discriminatory outcomes they experience as a result of the system. Scholars frequently mention racial bias in the criminal legal system and mass incarceration, the lexical descendent of overcriminalization. However, the scholarship often fails to consider the roles Whiteness and White supremacy play as the underlying logics and norms driving much of the bias in the system.

This Article examines the ways that Whiteness …

Categorizing Reentry And Reintegration Efforts Across Five States, Modena Stinnette

Dissertations

An average of 12,500 individuals are released from correctional control institutions in America each week. The reentry and reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals into communities has become a relevant concern. This collateral damage caused by mass incarceration continues to challenge correctional institutions and community-based service providers to create better pathways for individuals returning home. Ending the collateral damage caused by mass incarceration will require a change in the way reentry and reintegration are defined, policies are created, recidivism is defined, and services are provided to individuals affected by mass incarceration. This research explores reentry and reintegration practices across five states. …

Alternative-To-Incarceration Programs : An In-Depth Review Of State And Federal Drug Courts, Allison Kropf

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The United States’ recent shift toward rehabilitative justice has aided in the creation of alternatives to incarceration; among these alternatives is drug treatment court. This paper studies the similarities and differences between both state and federal drug treatment courts. Using three federal programs and nine state programs – located in three states: Florida, New York, and California – as proxies, rules, regulations, and criteria are examined in order to gauge the comprehensiveness and compatibility of drug treatment courts across the U.S. It is found that drug treatment courts across both the state and federal circuits are similar to one another, …

Statement Of The District Task Force On Jails And Justice Before The Committee On The Judiciary And Public Safety Of The Council Of The District Of Columbia. Budget Oversight Hearing For The Metropolitan Police Department, Katherine S. Broderick

D.C. Council Testimony

No abstract provided.

Can Covid-19 Teach Us How To End Mass Incarceration?, Amy Fettig

University of Miami Law Review

In this essay, the author argues that federal, state and local government response to the COVID-19 epidemic in prisons and jails was largely incompetent, inhumane, and contrary to sound public health policy, resulting in preventable death and suffering for both incarcerated people and corrections staff. However, the lessons learned from these failures provide a roadmap for policy priorities and legal reform in our ongoing need to decarcerate and end the era of mass incarceration, including: (1) rolling back extreme sentences, recalibrating sentences generally and providing for “second look” mechanisms to those currently serving sentences beyond 10 years; (2) ensuring that …

The Lasting Impact Of Deinstitutionalization: Policing And The Mental Health Crisis, Ruqayyah Sorathia

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Society is combating the detrimental effects of the deinstitutionalization policy, which transferred the treatment of mentally ill patients from state-run psychiatric hospitals to community-run psychiatric facilities. These patients frequently fall into relapses and are more likely to experience risky encounters with law enforcement officials who have no formal training in dealing with them. The paper analyzes the criminalization of mentally ill people, many with substance abuse and alcohol addictions, receiving treatment in jails and state prisons. Incarcerating people with mental illness, though reducing the homeless population from the street and disturbances faced by the public, still does not address the …

Reimagining Public Safety, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, abolitionists were repeatedly asked to explain what they meant by “abolish the police”—the idea so seemingly foreign that its literal meaning evaded interviewers. The narrative rapidly turned to the abolitionists’ secondary proposals, as interviewers quickly jettisoned the idea of literally abolishing the police. What the incredulous journalists failed to see was that abolishing police and prisons is not aimed merely at eliminating the collateral consequences of other social ills. Abolitionists seek to build a society in which policing and incarceration are unnecessary. Rather than a society without a means of protecting public safety, …

The War On Drugs And Its Legal Effects On Black Americans, Alexia L. Howard-Mullins

2022 Symposium

The differences in treatment between Black and white Americans in the past fifty years has been a topic of thought in the minds of political and sociological scholars since the inception of the War on Drugs in 1971. These differences in treatment may lead to discrimination legally, resulting in longer prison sentences and a higher proportion of Black Americans in prison. This study analyzes the results of the War on Drugs that led to disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans, including mandatory sentencing laws, drug classifications, and discrimination within law enforcement and the legal system. This study will use primary sources …

Rethinking Constitutionally Impermissible Punishment, Nadia Banteka

Scholarly Publications

Prisons and jails endanger the health and wellbeing of incarcerated individuals and their communities. These facilities are often overcrowded and unsanitary,1 with limited access to medical care, 2 and no basic sanitation and personal hygiene products unless a person can pay the spiked prices of the jail's commissary.3 Public health emergencies compound these dangers. Most recently, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis for people in detention, their families, and the communities surrounding jails and prisons. For over a year, there were no vaccines against COVID-19, new strains of the virus continue to evade vaccine-induced immunity, and there …

The Need For Belonging For Previously Incarcerated Probationers, Alaina Elam

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Research on offender rehabilitation has primarily focused on providing those who are incarcerated with programs and resources to mitigate the circumstances that would lead to recidivism. There is an absence of research on how the need for belonging could reduce recidivism in probationers. Recidivism remains a social problem for many U.S. communities, as those being released are not properly equipped for their transition. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of probationers regarding their transition into their community, recidivism, and their need for belonging. As individual fulfillment and human motivation were examined, Maslow’s self-actualization …

A Call To Dismantle Systemic Racism In Criminal Legal Systems, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities …

Remorse, Relational Legal Consciousness, And The Reproduction Of Carceral Logic, Kathryne M. Young, Hannah Chimowitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these “lifers” will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person’s remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional authenticity. Instead, remorse involves numerous elements, including the relationship between a person’s past and present motivations, beliefs, and affective states. To understand how parole board members make …

Ending The Discriminatory Pretrial Incarceration Of People With Disabilities: Liability Under The Americans With Disabilities Act And The Rehabilitation Act, Margo Schlanger, Elizabeth Jordan, Roxana Moussavian

Articles

Our federal, state, and local governments lock up hundreds of thousands of people at a time—millions over the course of a year—to ensure their appearance at a pending criminal or immigration proceeding. This type of pretrial incarceration—a term we use to cover both pretrial criminal detention and immigration detention prior to finalization of a removal order—can be very harmful. It disrupts the work and family lives of those detained, harms their health, interferes with their defense, and imposes pressure on them to forego their trial rights and accede to the government’s charges in an effort to abbreviate time behind bars. …